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Considered one of the greatest works of Chinese literature, this five-part story charts the changing fortunes of the Jia family. It sets worldly events - love affairs, sibling rivalries, even murder - within the context of the Buddhist understanding that karma determines the shape of our lives.

The story of David and John
This semester I've had the pleasure to have Prf. Minford, the cooperator and also son-in-law of the late David Hawkes (translator of the first 80 chapters of the Story of the Stone) as the instructor of a course about translating HLM. Hopefully, my memory can help me revisit this wonderful journey that he took us through. It is short. It is a lot of gossip & few th...(4回应)

2012-05-06 22:073人喜欢

The story of David and John

This semester I've had the pleasure to have Prf. Minford, the cooperator and also son-in-law of the late David Hawkes (translator of the first 80 chapters of the Story of the Stone) as the instructor of a course about translating HLM. Hopefully, my memory can help me revisit this wonderful journey that he took us through. It is short. It is a lot of gossip & few theories... But it is one of the best.

The Curse of Hong Lou Meng

"HLM is the last expression of a truly Chinese indigeneous thinking, as at that time there was no western influence yet." I think this is one of the very few general comment that Minford gave us about the book. He said that the first expression is the Book of Change 易经 (BTW ”‘易经’ is like a death sentence to translation.“ He said. True. And I think for a lot of people, 红楼梦 may not be a death sentence, but it is no vacation, either...)

Bare-foot Translation

Hawkes' style of translating is probably every translator's dream approach, honestly... At least for me, this combination of appreciating the original spirit while creating a parallel cultural universe provides the pleasure and the reason for why translation is so fascinating in the first place. However, translation is not all creating, so translators are permanently exposed to criticism and are often put in an inferior position to both the original author and to the readers.

There are plenty of critical reviews regarding Hawkes' translation approaches (you put the Hawkes' translation and the Yangs' translation side by side, and you see the contrast immediately--one is definitely a kind of more creative text, the other is very close to the source text). But what the course impresses me most is that Hawkes' text reminds me of what an enjoyable thing it is to be a translator. See one example: the way Bao-yu's upper-class dandy friend 冯紫英 talks in the translation. Feng Zi-ying was a 公子哥, really not that important but in a way he represented one kind of people that Bao-yu hanged out with besides the girls and maids. In Hawkes' text, Feng talked with an accent: he pronounced "father" as "faver", "mother" was spelled "muver". This accent is known to be the "upper-class toff". So Hawkes, accordingly, was very class-aware, an important part of British culture. He was a PS+V (public school + varsity, meaning private school+oxford/cambridge). So when he translated the voices of the characters, he related to his own cultural upbringing, and related 冯紫英 as a kind of "upper-class toff speaking", party boy. Compare his way of talking to 薛蟠's, the differences are very obvious. Accordingly, this characteristic of class-aware character depiction is very common in Dickens' work, of whom Hawke was a fan.

Although it is all very alien and humbling for us to know of all these little stuff...anyway, if you have read Dickens, Proust, Shakespeare, etc. you will have much more fun and delightful surprises reading Hawkes' version of HLM. Then similarly, if you have read 西厢记, 庄子,王维杜甫,金瓶梅, you will have much more fun reading Cao Xueqin's HLM. Are these two kinds of pleasures of reading considered parallel? This is one point that people argue over this translation approach. But the appeal is indeed obvious.

"Universal culture" and "Gem-like Ecstasy"

Minford believes that there is a so-called "universal culture". For me, this is a fresh view compared to the numerous translation criticism that over-use the terms "domestication" and "foreignization". When we look at the actual translation process of a translator in practice--not the kind of "theoretical comparison or analysis", but actually making use of first-hand resources, such as the translator's notes, ect--we can see that often than not, things are far more complicated than just choosing to be "domesticating" or "foreignizing" the text.

Trivia from Minford:

About Minford

-He's a dog person.

-He was (and perhaps still is?) a hippie.

-likes colorful scarves.

About Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Dai Naidie)

"Gladys loved gin. They both were big drinkers."

-They were both devout communist. Gladys did not like Bao-yu or Dai-yu. In fact, she once said, "If they were so in love, why didn't they just run away with each other?"

-The Yangs were not big fan of either Hongloumeng or its characters. They could not stand Dai-yu. In comparison, I find both Hawkes and Minford may have much deeper attraction as well as understanding for the characters in HLM.

-To comment on Gladys' remark about eloping, Minford had this to say, "How could they have run away? I could bet that Dai-yu had not even "run" for her entire life! Can you imagine them running? They wouldn't last a second outside that garden, outside that house."

About Arthur Waley

-He liked 陶渊明, 王维；disliked 李白.

-He was an English eccentric. So was David Hawkes. (English eccentric is probably a positive thing) Minford is probably one, too. But he later corrected himself, saying that he is not, because "He has sold his soul to the devil by becoming an academic."

About Chinese scholars

-闻一多 was one of the top three people who had influenced Hawkes the most. He said that 闻 was his ideal of a scholar-poet.

-They both didn't like Qian Zhong-shu...

About Bo Guagua

"It's really interesting, right?" In one class, Minford suddenly started to comment on the recent downfall of a certain politician. "These days. You open the newspaper and it's like some kind of political tv show on air every day!"

-Guagua went to Harrow in UK, which happens to be famous for its rich, stupid, decadent students.

-But that's not the worst for him. He later entered the Balliol College at Oxford, yet another college reputed for its corrupt, rich dandies. So, a combination of Harrow & Balliol. ("poor Bo Guagua", the lovely old man sighed.)

-No doubt, Guagua was a party boy at Balliol. One of his teacher went to Chris Patton to talk to Guagua for his outrageous behavious, but he couldn't get him to leaving. So they moved him into a 6 star hotel, presidential suit. Something like that.

The story of David and John
This semester I've had the pleasure to have Prf. Minford, the cooperator and also son-in-law of the late David Hawkes (translator of the first 80 chapters of the Story of the Stone) as the instructor of a course about translating HLM. Hopefully, my memory can help me revisit this wonderful journey that he took us through. It is short. It is a lot of gossip & few th...(4回应)

2012-05-06 22:073人喜欢

The story of David and John

This semester I've had the pleasure to have Prf. Minford, the cooperator and also son-in-law of the late David Hawkes (translator of the first 80 chapters of the Story of the Stone) as the instructor of a course about translating HLM. Hopefully, my memory can help me revisit this wonderful journey that he took us through. It is short. It is a lot of gossip & few theories... But it is one of the best.

The Curse of Hong Lou Meng

"HLM is the last expression of a truly Chinese indigeneous thinking, as at that time there was no western influence yet." I think this is one of the very few general comment that Minford gave us about the book. He said that the first expression is the Book of Change 易经 (BTW ”‘易经’ is like a death sentence to translation.“ He said. True. And I think for a lot of people, 红楼梦 may not be a death sentence, but it is no vacation, either...)

Bare-foot Translation

Hawkes' style of translating is probably every translator's dream approach, honestly... At least for me, this combination of appreciating the original spirit while creating a parallel cultural universe provides the pleasure and the reason for why translation is so fascinating in the first place. However, translation is not all creating, so translators are permanently exposed to criticism and are often put in an inferior position to both the original author and to the readers.

There are plenty of critical reviews regarding Hawkes' translation approaches (you put the Hawkes' translation and the Yangs' translation side by side, and you see the contrast immediately--one is definitely a kind of more creative text, the other is very close to the source text). But what the course impresses me most is that Hawkes' text reminds me of what an enjoyable thing it is to be a translator. See one example: the way Bao-yu's upper-class dandy friend 冯紫英 talks in the translation. Feng Zi-ying was a 公子哥, really not that important but in a way he represented one kind of people that Bao-yu hanged out with besides the girls and maids. In Hawkes' text, Feng talked with an accent: he pronounced "father" as "faver", "mother" was spelled "muver". This accent is known to be the "upper-class toff". So Hawkes, accordingly, was very class-aware, an important part of British culture. He was a PS+V (public school + varsity, meaning private school+oxford/cambridge). So when he translated the voices of the characters, he related to his own cultural upbringing, and related 冯紫英 as a kind of "upper-class toff speaking", party boy. Compare his way of talking to 薛蟠's, the differences are very obvious. Accordingly, this characteristic of class-aware character depiction is very common in Dickens' work, of whom Hawke was a fan.

Although it is all very alien and humbling for us to know of all these little stuff...anyway, if you have read Dickens, Proust, Shakespeare, etc. you will have much more fun and delightful surprises reading Hawkes' version of HLM. Then similarly, if you have read 西厢记, 庄子,王维杜甫,金瓶梅, you will have much more fun reading Cao Xueqin's HLM. Are these two kinds of pleasures of reading considered parallel? This is one point that people argue over this translation approach. But the appeal is indeed obvious.

"Universal culture" and "Gem-like Ecstasy"

Minford believes that there is a so-called "universal culture". For me, this is a fresh view compared to the numerous translation criticism that over-use the terms "domestication" and "foreignization". When we look at the actual translation process of a translator in practice--not the kind of "theoretical comparison or analysis", but actually making use of first-hand resources, such as the translator's notes, ect--we can see that often than not, things are far more complicated than just choosing to be "domesticating" or "foreignizing" the text.

Trivia from Minford:

About Minford

-He's a dog person.

-He was (and perhaps still is?) a hippie.

-likes colorful scarves.

About Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Dai Naidie)

"Gladys loved gin. They both were big drinkers."

-They were both devout communist. Gladys did not like Bao-yu or Dai-yu. In fact, she once said, "If they were so in love, why didn't they just run away with each other?"

-The Yangs were not big fan of either Hongloumeng or its characters. They could not stand Dai-yu. In comparison, I find both Hawkes and Minford may have much deeper attraction as well as understanding for the characters in HLM.

-To comment on Gladys' remark about eloping, Minford had this to say, "How could they have run away? I could bet that Dai-yu had not even "run" for her entire life! Can you imagine them running? They wouldn't last a second outside that garden, outside that house."

About Arthur Waley

-He liked 陶渊明, 王维；disliked 李白.

-He was an English eccentric. So was David Hawkes. (English eccentric is probably a positive thing) Minford is probably one, too. But he later corrected himself, saying that he is not, because "He has sold his soul to the devil by becoming an academic."

About Chinese scholars

-闻一多 was one of the top three people who had influenced Hawkes the most. He said that 闻 was his ideal of a scholar-poet.

-They both didn't like Qian Zhong-shu...

About Bo Guagua

"It's really interesting, right?" In one class, Minford suddenly started to comment on the recent downfall of a certain politician. "These days. You open the newspaper and it's like some kind of political tv show on air every day!"

-Guagua went to Harrow in UK, which happens to be famous for its rich, stupid, decadent students.

-But that's not the worst for him. He later entered the Balliol College at Oxford, yet another college reputed for its corrupt, rich dandies. So, a combination of Harrow & Balliol. ("poor Bo Guagua", the lovely old man sighed.)

-No doubt, Guagua was a party boy at Balliol. One of his teacher went to Chris Patton to talk to Guagua for his outrageous behavious, but he couldn't get him to leaving. So they moved him into a 6 star hotel, presidential suit. Something like that.

“ "I wonder,"thought dai-yu,'just what sort of graceless creature of bao-yu is going to be!' the young gentleman who entered in answer to her unspoken question had........blablabla。。。 ”
and here comes a little poetry depicted charming baoyu。。。。><
" his glace was soulful,
yet from his lips the laughter often leaped;
a world of charm upon thet brow was hea...

2011-07-21 15:40

“ "I wonder,"thought dai-yu,'just what sort of graceless creature of bao-yu is going to be!' the young gentleman who entered in answer to her unspoken question had........blablabla。。。 ”